Sociological Analysis of Football Players' Social Capital and its Impact on Professional Ethics Using Importance-Performance Analysis

This article was conducted with the aim of implementing sociological analysis of the social capital of football players and its impact on professional ethics. This study is applied-developmental in terms of purpose and survey-based cross-sectional in terms of data collection method. The community of participants of the qualitative part includes 35 prominent players of the country's premier league, who were selected using theoretical sampling. The sample size of the quantitative part was estimated by the effect size and power test method to be 155 people, and the sampling was done by the cluster-random method. A semi-structured interview and a researcher-made questionnaire were used to collect data. Data analysis was done, in the qualitative part, with the grounded theory method in Maxqda software, and in the quantitative part, with the importance-performance analysis method in SPSS software. The research findings indicated that empowering players, creating a culture in the club, monitoring the holding of official matches, and the Premier League are the causal factors that affect the social capital of football players. Social capital, by influencing professional ethics, ultimately leads to the growth and success of football in the country. Based on the analysis of the importance of performance, the constructs of "monitoring the holding of matches," "players' mental concerns," and "material problems and issues" are in the "weakness" area, and the distance between these constructs is significant.